


Calamus in Flames

by Jonaira



Series: Calamus [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: 1930s, Angst, Angst and Humor, Art, Artist Steve Rogers, Background Character Death, Bi-Curiosity, Bucky Barnes & Steve Rogers Friendship, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes-centric, Captain America: The First Avenger, Coming of Age, Drawing, Dream Sex, During Canon, Everyone Needs A Hug, F/M, Gay Male Character, Gender Confusion, Gender Identity, Genderbending, Genderfuck, Genderplay, Growing Up, Grumpy Bucky Barnes, Humor, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Idiots in Love, Inspired by Poetry, Internalized Homophobia, Invasion of Privacy, M/M, Male Homosexuality, Mild Smut, Minor Injuries, Minor Original Character(s), Missing Scene, Mutual Pining, One-Sided Attraction, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pining Steve Rogers, Poetry, Pre-Canon, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Realization, Rule 63, Sassy Steve Rogers, Self-Acceptance, Self-Denial, Sexual Content, Sexual Fantasy, Slice of Life, Smut, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, fem!Bucky, i love this tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-10 02:52:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7827535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jonaira/pseuds/Jonaira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier encounters some technical difficulties and performance issues mid-mission. Running the diagnostic to detect the origins they stem from proves to be a lot trickier than expected though. </p><p>Bucky blames it all on the heat. But hey, nobody's asking him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Calamus in Flames

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the fourteenth poem, Not Heat Flames Up and Consumes in the 'Calamus' clutch of poems by Walt Whitman, from his book Leaves of Grass.  
> Incidentally a Brooklyn boy himself, they served as his coming-out of sorts.  
> If you want to read all 45 ( they're powerful and very moving- and also wonderfully gay. Some later editions saw them whittled down to 39 due to the withholding of some of the more personal pieces) here's a link:
> 
> http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1860/clusters/76
> 
> Apologies if you find the tenses playing hopscotch jarring. If anything, I hope it adds to the overall rawness of the piece, that being what I was aiming for.
> 
> Any mistakes are my own.

 

 

_14_

_NOT_   _heat flames up and consumes,_

_Not sea-waves hurry in and out,_

_Not the air, delicious and dry, the air of the ripe_  
  
summer, bears lightly along white down-balls of   
  
myriads of seeds, wafted, sailing gracefully, to   
  
drop where they may,

 _Not these—O none of these, more than the flames_  
  
of me, consuming, burning for his love whom I love!

_O none, more than I, hurrying in and out;_

_Does the tide hurry, seeking something, and never_

_give up? O I the same;_

_O nor down-balls, nor perfumes, nor the high_  
  
rain-emitting clouds, are borne through the open   
air,

_Any more than my Soul is borne through the open  
air,_

_Wafted in all directions, O love, for friendship, for_

_you._

_\- Walt Whitman,                                                           Calamus no.14,                                                         Leaves of Grass, pub.1860_

 

**6th August, 1965.**

**The** **Count Basie Orchestra, DAR Constitution Hall, Washington DC.**

 

The Winter Soldier blinks away the trickle of perspiration that wends its way into his eye. 

Ignores the way the canvas-Kevlar matrix of his tactical gear grows stiffer with the sweat that evaporates as quickly as it forms, leaving his skin increasingly tacky. He's positioned near the massive sodium vapour stage lights, high up on the stage rigging behind the heavy velvet curtain tops, where the still air is hotter than a furnace.

He's been lying on his stomach, braced on his elbows, along the length of one of the stage rigging beams, the width of which was a grand total of ten inches. His knees were stiff from being locked gripping the narrow beam on either side for six hours straight, and he’d lost sensation over his ribs three hours back.

He ignores the discomfort.

The Soldier had been up and in position long before the instruments had even been bought onto the stage. He's had his eye glued to the scope for the better part of the concerts' first half and the entire second half, waiting for that one single bar in the big band jazz symphony when the music will swell with the brass and drums, and nobody will have even the slightest chance of hearing the quiet shot he'll take. His target is a young, brilliant American scientist whose death is integral to tipping the space race and Moon landing in favor of the Motherland. The Soldier thinks the whole space race is an unnecessary expense- he believes there are places here on Earth itself far more bizarre and beautiful than whatever they might find up there. Poor Laika hadn’t done nothing to a soul. He’d snuck her bits of his rations when the white coats weren’t looking, and she’d been smart enough to never bark or whine when he walked by, but her tail would wag hard enough that her entire behind would shake. But nobody’s asking him.

The Soldier licks the salt from his lips as he waits for his three-second window of opportunity. To his immense surprise, he finds himself enjoying the melody. Definitely one of his better missions, even with the damn heat that's slow-roasting him.

There's the telltale lull in the music, wind segueing into strings, soft cellos and the harp, but it’s the keening of violins that starts a sweet, dull ache in his throat, as his vocal cords strain to match their pitch, even though he’s quieter than a corpse.

The Soldier isn’t sure how he knows this, (his exposure to music of any kind is so severely limited so as to be considered negligible) but the violin was the instrument whose sound most resembled the human voice.

That fact is utterly useless to him; he can’t use it as part of a mission since playing the violin isn’t a skill he’s mastered. And yet, there exists an elusive and wholly undeniable charm in possessing knowledge completely divorced from those facts he _needs_ to know for the mission, possessing innocent knowledge just for the sake of knowing and untainted by its parsing through his handlers first.

The violins grow feverish now, their strings singing frantically when suddenly, he's struggling to draw breath, chest constricting violently as a flash of fire runs through him from head to toe. He feels hotter than the barrel of a gun after discharge, like one spark could ignite him, and now the Soldier can't ignore the blood running south.

Can't ignore the way he throbs painfully against the unyielding metal of the beam he lies against in mere seconds. 

Bewildered by the reaction of his body to that of the violins, he tries to shift ever so slightly, settle back into the lock-jointed position of a sniper, while adjusting for the mutiny in his pants.

And as he moves by millimeters, his boot slips and he jerks wildly, trying not to knock the rifle while he spreads his arms to regain equilibrium. The heavy metal of his left arm overbalances him though, and he tips over the edge, rifle sent tumbling down with him as they plummet down towards the orchestra.

Below him, the music swells like a furious tide.

                                       

                                                                                                   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

It's hot.

That kind of heat that made Bucky feel like he was being dragged from the inside out, something clawing its way through his chest, sliding up his throat on its smooth belly. 

The starch in his shirt had long gone limp with the way he'd been sweating, and all he wanted to do was rip the damn thing off and tear through the streets with the wind buffeting his bare chest. 

Although he'd probably be back after just a couple of blocks to look for the buttons scattered on the sidewalk.

Sometimes, he wishes he weren't so goddamn pragmatic. 

It's been a long day, but Steve still won't be back from that meeting with the publishers yet, so dinner is his baby today. Maybe he could get away with cracking a couple of eggs out on the fire escape, watch them sizzle in the heat.

And then die from food poisoning.

If the fucking heat doesn't kill them first, that is.

It's about five in the evening, but it might as well be high noon with the way the shadows vindictively remain short, barely slanting so that Bucky has to walk as close to the buildings as he can, trying to walk under the shade from their porches and parapets. The darn concrete radiates heat at him though, and he gives up altogether and jogs the last block home.

The home in question is a sad little one bedroom fixer-upper apartment that Steve got after selling the two-bedroom flat that had been in a slightly nicer neighborhood. He'd lived in it with his mum for all his life.

The two of them had been living here two years, (well Steve had, Bucky's just been here on a permanent basis nearing a year now but he came over often enough before that to count as a roommate who just went out a lot), and Bucky could swear by the hair on his chinny-chin-chin that the flat’s held together with nothing but spit shine, duct tape and the remains of the generations upon generations of cockroaches and other assorted beasties that have long been the real landlords of this dump.

They're all the way up on the fourth floor with no elevator (which Bucky is sure that even if they  _did_  have, it wouldn't work for shit), right under the terrace. Which means that the plaster always gets a bit puffy with moisture if it rains for a couple of days straight, and that they cook like potatoes in their jackets in the summer, roasting in the direct heat from the terrace. He once found a lonely little toadstool growing in a corner where a bit of the wood skirting of the floor had rotted, although that could have been attributed to the fact that Bucky was grade-A slob, and Steve only cleaned corners when upset. He said that spiders trapped other creepy-crawlies and didn’t want to disturb their webs. Bucky would’ve called him on his bullshit, except he thought spiders were kinda cute as well. At least they battled the damn roaches.

Steve had fainted from the heat that first summer he'd lived here alone, too weak to even make it across the landing and down the stairs to ring the Barnes' home from Ernesto's telephone. If not for Bucky stopping by every evening like a particularly well trained homing pigeon, even if sometimes it was just to tell him a rude joke he’d picked up, Lord knows what would have happened to the stupid punk. 

Bucky remembered that evening so clearly, he could've even drawn it. The joke was on him this time.

The way Steve had been on the floor, spreadeagled like some kind of starfish in an effort to increase surface area to give off heat. The way his thin chest had risen and fallen exaggeratedly with the effort of breathing in the still air.

The dark crimson stain of spilt beetroot water spreading out on the scruffy threadbare rug under the table. He'd been painting then.

Bucky knew that frogs could actually cough up their stomachs out through their mouths to empty out its contents if they'd eaten something nasty.

That's the way he'd felt, gut lurching so hard that he'd thought it would come out past clenched teeth when his first thought had been that Steve had cracked his head open on the corner of the table and that stain was his blood spreading ruby bright across the mat.

Bucky lost his voice for a day, and was hoarse for the next one after the subsequent argument with Steve, but James Barnes could teach a mule a thing or two when it came to being stubborn, and he'd moved in for good a week later. 

Yeah, their flat sucked harder than a two-dollar whore, as Freddie from the docks would put it delicately. Being the highest up there, the water pressure was near non-existent and gravity was the only thing that kept the shower-head putting out a somewhat finicky piss-like trickle. The imagery was perfectly disgusting.

Bucky had always called a spade a spade though, and it amused him enough to keep his mind off the alternative that was to be frustrated at their possession of such charming facilities.

Being the highest up did have its perks though. They'd take up a couple of blankets and thin sheets, and after sweeping the terrace floor, would sleep up there during the summer nights. The latent heat that the brick and concrete retained from the sun beating down on it all day long was pleasantly warm through their blankets, and the thin sheets were more than enough on balmy nights.  New York lights always did play for more attention and won out over the brilliance of the stars, but it was nice to know they were still up there. That Sarah was somewhere above them, with clear sight lines to watching over her son and her all-but-adoptive son. He’d never tell a soul, but he fancied that the one bright star in Orion that always seemed to wink for him was Dad. Sometimes, they'd even catch the dewfall at dawn.

But right now, the air was sultry and the pavement undulated in the heat haze before his eyes, toes burning in his shoes with the heat from the tarred ground even though he'd double-timed it back.

The heat wave over the last week had everyone in its thrall. Becca had been irritable, Ma even more so, and he wishes something fierce that Pa was still around to get red-faced in the heat. They'd known his end was coming, but that didn't make it ache any less even now. His pigeonly duties now consist of going to the house  _he_ grew up in every evening or so and helping out however he was needed.

Not regularly  _this_  week though, since Becca had categorically told him that the heat had made her and Ma both snappish enough to be able to pick a fight with their own shadows, so he was free not to swing by and add to the possibility of heat-induced flaring tempers.

He knew they'd be okay though. Part of the reason he'd moved out when he did, just three months after Dad had passed was because they could make money off the arrangement he had in mind.

Becca had moved out of their shared childhood bedroom and with Ma into Ma and Pa's room which now had the free bed. They'd rented out the now empty bedroom to one sensible, spitfire of a girl named Angie, who was happy to have a local family to live with and learn the city from. Plus she ate a whole lot less than _he_ ever had, saving on food money. With his wages and the rent money coming in, they were more comfortable than ever before, and he slept peacefully knowing that Becca could finish highschool and even go to college if she wanted to without having to drop out and start working immediately after Pops caught the express upstairs. The remainder of his wages went towards splitting the rent with Steve and the food money for their arrangement. Steve's salary covered the water and electricity bills and the other half of the rent, and his assortment of medications. He could keep an eye on everyone that he cared about and needed to have a peeper on, and things were as smooth as they'd ever been, things were good, things were -

Hot.

So blazingly hot.

Bucky couldn't think straight with the heat. He stripped off his shirt and undershirt as soon as he was through the door, belt undone and tossed as he made a beeline for the sink to wash his face. Even the water was hotter than any bathwater their wheezy little shower could spout- he stuck his whole head under. Still, his sopping wet hair cooled him quick enough, contact-chilled droplets racing deliciously down his chest to soak the waistband of his trousers in patches. He popped the button on that too, unzipped, letting the pants hang looser and the water soak the rim of his boxers instead. 

He felt a bit indecent, but then again, so was the heat in its savage clamoring to bring the city to its knees.

 _Let it try_ , thought Bucky with derisive flippancy. New Yorker's were a bunch of the most resilient fuckers on the East Coast, and if asked his humble opinion, probably in the whole the country. 

Two flats below, Old Man Emmanuel was making love to his violin. He played like his heart was breaking, shattering within his ebony-skinned chest. As if the strings he drew the bow across were plucked from the tapestry of his own life rather than just stretches of wire on wooden bridge. He used to play on this joke of an instrument which had three strings instead of four and a shaggy old bow with the horsehair fraying out of the clips at the two ends. The whole building, Steve and Bucky proudly included, had chipped in to buy the man a complete new set, their only request being that he sit out on his fire escape when he played, so that the entire population of the building could enjoy his music. That man could turn melody into magic, and soul into song with a handful of notes.

"This old man ain't gonna be be lickin' nobody's boots to git me a chair in the symphony orchestra. I'm playin' for the love of the music, and especially for people like y'all. It would be an honor," he'd said as he accepted the kit.

He's playing something new today, neither jazz, nor swing or classic.

It’s sort of longing, low and drawn out, and perfectly complimentary to the soporific warmth pervading the apartment. Bucky vows to ask him about it when he next sees the old guy. It's like the heat got woven into song.

Bucky knows he needs to get the chow on the hob, but right now, the idea of voluntarily exposing himself to yet another heat source strikes him as distinctly masochistic. Instead, he flops down onto the sofa with a feline languor. Bucky flicked off an adventurous spider who had ventured too far away from its probable web under the couch. "Don't you go playing Columbus on my couch, Ok ? He pissed off the natives and we all know how well that turned out."

The spider scuttled away, clearly conceding Bucky's superiority. Spiders were smart that way.

He’d get to fixing dinner in a bit he tells himself, he's still got an hour before Steve gets home. It isn't _as_ hot now, and the worn cloth of the cushions are cool against his back.

The mellow evening sun streams in like molten gold, the way it inches over everything in its path, gilding into a fleetingly delicate beauty the most mundane of objects in its fading warmth. He lazily tracks it's slow creep across the room, watches the way the light burnishes the sweat on his bare chest, the smooth swells of muscles in his torso throwing narrow shadows in their wake.

The light reaches the table and flows across the book resting there. One of Steve's newspaper covered ones, so a home use doodle book and not those which he’d use for commissions and official work. he's seen everything in Stevie's old rough books, and wonders if this is anything new.

Bucky’s already turned to the first page, and drinking in the clean lines of the sculpted back of a female model before he even can even think that this might constitute a breach of what little illusion of privacy they have in this matchbox of a flat, living in each other’s pockets as they do.

Her smooth, decidedly _naked_ back. What he _does_ end up thinking is _Well gee, this sure ain't one of Steve's Hallmark commission rough books._ Unless the company is planning to branch into a decidedly naughtier collection.

Steve had never stopped him from seeing his work before. In fact, he'd often randomly ask Bucky to hold up his arms or legs a certain way so he could do quick study, practice drawing limbs in different positions before showing Bucky the finished work. Bucky used to joke that if Steve were to ever have a codename, it would be Rembrandt.

He supposed he'd stumbled upon Steve's class-work book instead.

Still, it's all official coursework isn't it ? Can't be anything in here too risqué for his sandpaper-smooth sensibilities, can there? Something Steve wouldn’t want him to see?

Because it's not one he's ever seen before, not one that Steve had shown him with an airy wave and a casual,  _P_ _enny for your thoughts, except we're sorta broke after you dragged me out for drinks_ tossed at him.

There's definitely a reason for that. Bucky just doesn't want to get bogged down with what this reason might possibly be. He's smart that way, see.

Regardless, his palms are sweating and for the first time in the day, it’s not because of the wonderful weather. And because he'd always had a soft corner for that darn cat, he takes a whisker outta its ‘stache and lets his curiosity get the better of him. He keeps the pages flipping.

It's mostly rather tame, considering it’s the life drawing coursework. He's ten sketches in, and so far, the most bohemian drawing was that of the lady's back on the first page. Also, no sketch has clearly revealed her face so far. Just the shading hinting at a general face shape and deep shadows for her eyes. Yet, as strange as it seemed to him, there was something oddly familiar about the poses.

Bucky finds himself relaxing into the couch as suddenly, the pages seem a lot friendlier in their innocent portrayal of silhouettes and complex hand positions. Even the shape of the hands is vaguely familiar. He’s absolutely gotta ask Steve about this dame now, because it’s starting to psych him out just a little bit.

As he went through more and more sketches though, he realized that it's been the same model Steve's been drawing well into half of the book. And still no face. Must've been a swell model then, to sit for what easily could've covered months and months of coursework. There aren't too many full body sketches of her, and not a single one with her complete face. She's eerily familiar. Especially when he sees the next sketch, clearly a candid and one of the naughtier ones so far. Bucky felt like he knew her, or should've known her at the very least. Although he's quite sure she isn't somebody he's ever enjoyed a night out on town with. 

Something about the easy way she drapes herself across the chair, legs spread cheekily wide open under the flowing material of her long skirt, the way she's leaning forward, a man’s shirt loose on her frame with the top two buttons undone, her weight on both hands gripping the front edge of the chair between her spread legs, each bare foot locked behind the back legs of the chair. And still no face.

He imagines she’d have been smiling- smirking, really- at the earnest and somewhat flustered kid who’d captured her on paper. Bucky would’ve winked, had he been posing for Steve while looking like that.

And for the second time that day, he feels rather indecent; there’s a deep intimacy in the way the muse and artist are linked and inked together in lines and curves on those pages. He can’t help feeling like an outsider, an intruder with no invitation to witness the relationship captured on paper between those two. He’d be the last person to call himself a saint, although he’s also pretty sure his once gentle spiral downwards must’ve just turned into a nose-dive. Still, it’s such a raw and unfiltered glimpse into Steve, who he is, and what makes him _him_. The punk may be a little dandelion head of grit and gall, but this right here, his art, was what made Steve come alive, bare his soul to those he considered family, and even after all these years, was a damn fucking privilege. Bucky’s seen Steve’s sketches of his ma, of Bucky, a few here and there of Becca, of Bucky’s parents or even his old ex-neighbors.

There was invariably a sort of tenderness in the way he’d draw them, affection in his lines that always was missing from the coolly professional commissions and portraits he’d do for outsiders.

And it struck him so suddenly- _Steve’s gonna go down on one knee for her_. _Must be saving up for a ring even._ The amount of _love-_ there was no other word for it- that had gone into every line leaps clean off the page. Steve was a wizard with his pencil, like Emmanuel with his violin, and Bucky wouldn’t claim to be an expert at much, but he’d call dibs on being able to read Steve better than just about anybody else now that Sarah Rogers was in heaven. And he didn’t need to be no world-famous art critic to be able to tell that his best friend was head over heels with this girl. He’s suitably miffed that Steve neglected to tell Bucky and thereby provide him with fodder to tease the bejeesus out of him for the next month or so.

Now that he’s sure that he’s sure he’s looking at the closest approximation of a future sister-in-law of sorts, he feels all the more like a greaseball, even though there are (thankfully) no nudes here. Yet. Christ.

Anyone calling him a prude would be cheerfully given the bird, and a second one for good measure- Tijuana bibles weren’t his thing but he wasn’t a stranger to skin mags either.

He also knew that those pin-up girls were aware of exactly what they were signing up for, were aware that their posing and primping was especially designed to appeal to some stranger’s eyes. _Those_ over-sexed images weren’t meant to convey an entire relationship full precious moments and innocent teasing between artist and muse, unlike the stuff in Steve’s book. It was _private,_ and that poor girl hadn’t agreed to be ogled at by Bucky of all people. In fact, he shouldn’t have kept looking through the book for something more than just a hint of her face any more than he’d have deliberately walked into a room in which he knew that Steve and his girl were getting down to business in.

Bucky thinks he might be the only guy who’s so completely freaked rather pleased than to a see more than a bit of ankle on some pretty girl he’s never met before. He snapped the book shut, and tried to breathe evenly for a change. The shadows grew longer and deeper, unnoticed by him.

Then with no heads-up, he’s gripped by a giddy happiness so intense, that if he wasn’t already lying down, it might have dropped him anyway.

Stevie’s got himself a real beauty. All his fretting through the years over Steve never going out with a dame more than once, how he would never find himself a sweetheart, was in vain. He’s so happy for Steve, he isn’t even as peeved as he should be. Because _man_ was Steve a stubborn goat when it came to meeting a girl. You’d think she’d be coming to pull out his toenails.

It wasn’t like he didn’t like going out; Steve would grin so wide all evening that Bucky’s own cheeks would ache in sympathy when it was just the two of them. But thrown a little feminine charm into the mix, and the night went tits up. Steve would clam up and be unerringly, painfully polite, and so downright stiff in general, that even a plank of wood could have had itself a better time.

Whenever Bucky would demand why Steve made no effort whatsoever to have a good time (“You don’t even have to _dance_ with her Steve ! Just, maybe, y’know, leave the stick up your backside at home ?”) Steve would come up with his patent answer,

“Guess I just don’t know how to talk to women, Buck.”

To which Bucky’s answer would always be,

“That’s ‘cause you don’ even want to _learn_ , kid.”

And so it would go, looping that same old loop.

Until now.

Yeah, Bucky’s on cloud nine. And still has no idea what this girls’ face looks like. He isn’t too concerned with what she looks like; it’s none of his business anyway, and if she’s good enough for Steve, she’s part of the family for him.

Just a pretty mug was never something either he or Steve had valued the most in a woman. But he’s got a fairly good idea of what the rest of her looks like, and it makes him smile when he thinks about the unusual beauty that Steve favored in a woman.

She’s long-limbed, lanky even, except for the way smooth muscle softens and fills in the contours of her body. She was powerfully muscled for a girl, with shoulders broader than the average ladies’, with a trim waist that swelled into broad hips. Her hair’s a riot; shaded dark, short and shaggy like a boy’s reaching past her collar. It looked like she’d had fingers run though it, gentle at first and then increasingly rough, exploring and tugging.

As if captured in graphite fleeting moments after she’d just rolled out of bed, fresh out of the _artist’s_ bed and teasing him with a muse he couldn’t resist. The book having long fallen shut, had opened a door in Bucky’s head of whose existence he’d had no previous idea.

The once-rosy sunlight in their flat grows ever dimmer, but Bucky doesn’t notice; he’s far away and right there, bathed in the clear, sharp light of morning, in the same bedroom with Steve and his gal.

Watching the way Steve wakes up at first light, bird-like in both in manner and make, with his delicate frame. He’d sleep shirtless on those summer nights, sharp angles of his frame thrown in clear relief under the light streaming in, the same light that now steals across rumpled sheets to reveal his bed-mate.

Bucky’s silent as a mouse in his corner, watching as Steve smiles unrestrained at her sleeping form, before trying to disentangle himself from the mess of limbs and linen without waking up his paramour.  Watches the way she cracks open a single blue eye and grins back at her guy. Bucky distinctly approves of the way she clumsily shoots out an arm to reach for the back of Steve’s neck, fingers lingering there before she pulls him firmly back down to kiss her. Bucky finds himself chuckling at the way Steve gets yanked back down to business with a muffled thump into the mattress, at the way he gets (wo)manhandled onto his back so that she can straddle him.

He still hasn’t seen any part of her face though, save for the colour of her eyes and the deep dimple in her chin. Still, he’s quickly distracted by the way Steve’s long fingers weave into her short mop-top, pulling her mouth tighter against his. _Interesting_ , thinks Bucky. He’d always figured Steve to be the less demanding partner, the more giving of the two. Bucky’s has no complaints about the manner in which he’s found out this tidbit though.

And yet again his attention is drawn to the way she’s moaning quietly into his mouth, or maybe those are _Steve’s_ moans into her mouth, and then against her chest, where he’s enthusiastically more than simply _wishing_ her a good morning. Bucky can’t tell what exactly Steve’s doing though, the angle he’s watching them from is behind and to the side, so all he gets is an eyeful of the way her back arches and flexes as Steve goes at it like a pro. Bucky's gonna take whatever he can get, thank you.

He sits transfixed, frozen, as he watches the way Steve pulls her down flush against him and flips them over, so she’s the one on her back, face still hidden behind Steve’s back this time.

He’s achingly hard, straining against and dampening the front of his trousers, but he’d be the biggest chump if he looked away from the scene unfolding in front him to just take the edge off for even a second .

The bright, white room flickers golden around the edges, blurring and shifting until it’s just the two figures on the bed rendered in sharp detail, existing almost independent of their material surroundings. Steve inches his mouth down her body, head disappearing beneath the sheet. She’s thrown an arm over her face, covering it from his sight again, as she squirms and sighs herself breathless. Under the sheet, Steve does something spectacular then, because her sounds cut off with a choked off gasp, followed by an unbroken, long-drawn out whimper. She goes boneless on the mattress, hand reaching down gently to pull Steve up to thank him properly. Except when he does resurface, after pecking her on the mouth, instead of flopping back down by her side as Bucky would’ve expected him to do, Steve climbs over the edge of the bed and then looks straight at Bucky, and beams brighter than the morning sun.

He’d been sitting pretty in his corner all this while, present, but not really _there_ until Steve went and made Bucky just as real as him and his lady. Transfixed, he watched as Steve doesn’t even bother with pulling on shorts before he walks towards Bucky. Bucky can’t tear his eyes away from Steve’s face though; he could’ve been wearing a showgirls’ outfit for all that Bucky would’ve noticed of his clothes, or rather, the copious lack of them.

“Stop catching flies there Buck and lend me a hand,” he smiles at Bucky.

Bucky feels his ears heat. “Won’t she mind?” he asks, voice cracking even worse than when he was fourteen. He’s rubbernecking it, trying to see if she’s offended with the way her man is ignoring her for _Bucky_ of all people. He’s so far below their leagues, he ain’t even playing the same sport.

“Why don’t you let _me_ answer that one ?”

And suddenly, after all this time, she’s speaking. She sits up, and at long last, he’s seeing her.

It’s somewhat anticlimactic. All he sees is the same face that looks back at him from their old, opaque-patched mirror every morning, the same voice that sings in the shower.

He blinks then, although a part of him isn’t really as surprised as it should be. It _is_ him, but not. His jaw isn’t _as_ square, the angles of his cheekbones aren’t as unforgivingly sharp, and while husky in a way that conjures up the sliding burn of well-aged whiskey down his throat, that isn’t _his_ voice for sure.

His heart jitterbugs with an overwhelming sense of relief, and an undercurrent of…ruefulness ? Still, he pulls a smile for the girl who’s essentially the female version of himself before turning to Steve.

“Hell Stevie, you two really had me there for a sec. I thought your lovely lady there was me,”

And he’d looked away from Steve to punctuate that statement by winking at her, only to find _himself,_ familiarly flat-chested with outdoor plumbing and all, grinning back lazily from the bed.

“I figured you were busy being too chicken to say something to Steve yourself, so at least one of us had to get a move on our boy here. _I_ volunteered, a great personal sacrifice, that. You’re welcome.” he finishes smugly, laying a hand on his heart.

“I did ask nicely,” says Steve mildly.

His doppelganger makes a grab for Steve’s hand- in the dollhouse sized room, it isn’t too much of a stretch- and interlaces their fingers.

“You were _very_ persuasive.” Agrees the other Bucky fervently as he pulls Steve onto his lap and proceeds to kiss him thoroughly.

The original Bucky, the poor schmuck who dearly wants to know what the ever-loving _fuck_ is going on and who would also simultaneously greatly appreciate _getting_ his fuck on with Steve, is unfortunately and inexplicably still glued to the chair.

He never comes to know what he does next though, because one moment he’s smack-dab center in one of the most bizarrely erotic scenarios that one might ever be confronted by, and the next second he’s wide awake and flailing in the dark, blind as bat with a fresh bruise blooming along the side of his head.

Bucky struggled to get his bearings in the dark, and put together that he was on the floor, having fallen off the couch and whacking his head against the edge of the table on his way down. It was the gunshot-like sound of a key turning in the lock of their apartment that had woken him up in the first place, although he supposed he had gravity to thank for the bruising.  He also realizes that he's maddeningly hard, his undone pants have slid even further his hips and thereby offer no cover worth a damn, and that any moment now-

Yup, there comes the light, and he's again blinded for the second time in under ten seconds. 

Disoriented and in a fair amount of pain, he blinks owlishly at Steve in greeting. 

"Jesus, what happened to you ?!" Steve kicks of his shoes quickly and hurries over to help Bucky off the floor. 

"Gravity." Bucky grouses back at him, busy clawing his way onto the couch now and doing his best to hide his big little problem. 

"Sounded like something breaking as soon as I opened the door and thought we’d had a burglar. Considering that was actually your head, I'd rather have had the robbers instead of you bleeding over the rug. Would'a been a laugh to see their faces when the only things worth stealing here would only fit through the front door." 

“So you figured you’d just stroll into the middle of a gang of armed thugs, while you’re all alone and in the dark.” Bucky got out past a groan.

“ _You_ could’ve been in here, shivering under the sink and waiting for a hero.” Steve fetched their well-stocked first aid kit from behind the door.

“Under the sink ? Nah. Inside the china cabinet’s more my style.”

“We don’t _have_ a china cabinet.”

“Exactly. Like I’ve no idea which hero _you’re_ on about.”

“Touché. I’d get you upside the head for that one, but I’d rather not inflict further brain damage.”

Bucky gracefully concedes defeat by poking Steve in the ribs while Steve carefully checks Bucky’s head for any bleeding, fingers gently probing his tender skull and running through his hair.

And the sensation of fingers carding through his hair causes every detail of Bucky’s dream to come rushing back to him in sharp detail at Steve’s careful touch, where earlier he’d only had the impression of bright light and a warmth spreading outwards from his gut, coupled with the strangest urge to lift Steve off the floor in a hug.

Steve seems to notice Bucky’s disheveled state for the first time. And his big little problem.

“Do you have a guest using our washroom ?!” he whispered frantically, looking around as if expecting Bucky’s presumed lady friend to appear and wave hello from inside.

“Hey, I wasn’t raised in a barn no matter what my last name might be. I’d have put a sock on the doorknob at very least. I was just feeling hot and had taken off everything non-essential,” Bucky winced as Steve reached a particularly tender spot.

“’S a good look on you,” Steve murmurs absentmindedly as he applies pressure to the small cut he’s found and then continues checking. He turned a bit pink when what he just said catches up to him, but didn’t shrug or take it back. Instead he gave Bucky a shit-eating grin.

“So, that was _some_ dream I woke you up from, huh?”

Bucky’s about to come back with something appropriately smart, but while he isn’t sure _what_ exactly to make of the dream, he can’t really call it a good one either.  Bucky’s trying to figure out how to explain that without having to go into too much detail about the events in the dream itself, when he catches sight of _the sketchbook_ lying under the table, patiently waiting to incriminate him.

“Ice ! Could you get me-” he starts, desperate to get Steve to turn away from him for even a moment so he can put it back where he found it, which is right in plain view on the table and Christ forgive him, he’s a goner, he’d done messed up good and proper this time.

Still, he’d deserve whatever he has coming to him, and when Steve springs up and darts off to get him the ice, Bucky swallows the series of lumps in his throat and with lead in the pit of his stomach, whips the book out from under the table and puts it back on the corner.

If Steve notices its sudden appearance there, he doesn’t let on, although Bucky did catch him eyeballing the book somewhat nervously when he thought that Bucky wasn’t looking. They both didn’t feel like cooking anything, so it was an apple each for dinner. It isn’t too satisfying a meal, but the guilt churning away in Bucky’s gut eats away at him more severely than the most insistent of hunger pangs. He can barely focus on Steve telling him how the meeting with the publisher went- he got the commission, but that was about all Bucky took away from the entire piece.

Bucky hadn’t even realized he’d zoned out until the sharp snap of fingers under his nose gets his attention. “We’ll need to get you checked out for a concussion,” Steve tells him firmly, sharp eyes raking Bucky’s hairline for anything he might have missed.

“Quit worrying Stevie, ‘m right as rain. Well, any rain that we’d be lucky enough to get in this hell. We’re already keeping the doctor away, see.” he says and waves his apple core at Steve.

Steve is supremely unimpressed, and looks pointedly from Bucky’s head to the table which had shifted a good four inches off position with the force of his fall. He lets it drop, though.

“Either way, I’m waking you up every hour tonight. Your ghost wouldn’t be any tidier than you alive, so I could do without you being dead.” Steve says flippantly enough, but won’t meet Bucky’s eye.

“Nah, just the embarrassment of being murdered by our coffee table would send my ghost packing, even if I weren’t laughed outta heaven for my cause of death.”

“Who said you’re going heaven,” the little punk asked innocently enough.

Bucky threw his apple core at Steve.

Still, once they’ve stopped laughing, Bucky can’t take the guilt anymore. Thanking all his stars that Steve can’t hear his heart going a mile-a-minute, he gestures to the book with his chin. “That new for class ? I’ve never seen it around before.” he gets out as coolly as he can. Bucky doesn’t think Steve is fooled for even a moment.

He can’t tell what Steve is thinking from the look he levels first at Bucky, and then the book. Steve had always put the _Ace_ in Pokerface.

It isn’t more than a couple of seconds, but it feels like years later for Bucky when Steve just as lightly as replies,

“Nope, not for class. Just one I mess around in.”

Steve reaches out for the book then, “Before I misplace it,” he says casually enough, but Bucky is sure he didn’t imagine the look of relief that crossed Steve’s face once it’s securely in his hands.

It’s the end of the conversation for that evening and they go about getting things ready for a new day. Bucky doesn’t feel any less uneasy, but he justifies it to himself by thinking that at least he gave Steve a chance to ask him if he’d been snooping around his stuff. He tries to convince himself that he would have answered honestly, had Steve outright asked. Bucky feels even more of a heel for thinking like that.

The weather finally breaks that night, and it pours and pours.

Bucky couldn’t get a wink of sleep, and not even because of Steve blearily checking up on him every hour as promised. After the third time, he gave up altogether and goes out onto the fire escape. The scent of rainwater on dusty streets wafted up and around him, and while he usually loved it, tonight the fresh scent did nothing for him.

He kept thinking back to something Steve had said to him just before they turned in for the night. The way he’d faced away from Bucky, stiff backed and head turned only just so, barely enough to see the way Steve’s eyes were tightly scrunched shut. As if it took all of his considerable courage to voice it to Bucky.

“I trust you, Buck. You know that, don’t you?”

And Bucky had replied, "I know," throat suddenly so parched he could barely get the two words out.

Bucky didn’t know shit. He didn’t have a damn clue. 

He stands out there long enough to get soaked to the skin from the spray and stiff jointed with the cold, shivering until his teeth clack together too hard for him to even hear himself think.

He can’t tell if it’s the rain on his face or his own tears though, when he wonders why it hurts so goddamn much when he wishes that the last part of his dream had been true.

 

                                                                                                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

The Soldier feels like his shoulder will grow a pair of lungs and a mouth just so that it can scream with pain, and there’s an ominous creaking from the reinforced steel beam as his metal fingers dig into and dent its edge, but he catches himself and snags the rifle in the same move, feet dangling precariously over the heads of the musicians below him.

The gears in the arm whir, high-pitched and straining to prevent the mechanisms from being ripped out of the socket they are mounted into. The Soldier can’t help the jarring thud of his heart accompanying the adrenaline surge, but a fright like that works wonders for an inconvenient erection and pretty soon he’s got his breathing under control and his heart rate is slowing again.

It’s all happened in under half-a-minute, but by the time he hauls himself and the rifle back onto the beam and into position, his 3 second window would have passed and the music will not be loud enough to cover the sound of his shot.

He’s twenty-eight seconds away from his window.

The Soldier slowly twists at his metal shoulder and locks the position.

Twenty seconds, and he braces the stock of the rifle against his flesh shoulder.

Fifteen seconds and he’s lining up the cross-hairs on his scope.

Nine seconds, and the face of the physicist sharpens in his sights.

Seven seconds and he locks his shooting wrist, breathes in, breathes out.

Five, and he’s stopped breathing.

Four,

Three,

Two,

The man smiles, blond haired and fine-boned. His eyes could be grey, but the Soldier thinks they’re closer to blue.

His features shift then, and it’s another man that the Soldier has got his sights trained on. He looks directly at the Soldier, smile softening to something serious. Earnest.

_I trust you._

His mouth forms the words, and even though it should be impossible, the Soldier hears a voice he’d heard once upon a dream, clear as if the man, more a boy really, had spoken from right next to the Soldier.

One.

The trigger is squeezed and the bullet spits out of the barrel, the recoil from his powerful long-range rifle making him sway slightly, all before he can even begin _trying_ to consider comprehending what he’d just seen.

The bullet embeds itself harmlessly into the headrest beside the target's head, now back to looking like the face in his mission dossier instead of some imaginary boy. The grin on his face quickly turns into bewilderment and then shock, before he tries to stand in a blind panic.

The Asset is faster though, and the physicist slumps back down into his seat, but not before showering the members of the audience within a two foot radius in brain and blood.

The agony in his shoulder makes itself known as the music below him stops abruptly and screaming takes its place. Once he drags himself back onto the beam and activates the tracker for his extraction, he takes a minute to catch his breath. A faint, persistent pinging draws his attention. He thinks it might be the tracker, but when he looks down he sees it’s his metal arm trembling where it rests against the steel beam and that’s what’s making the din. The rest of him is shaking even harder.

It only gets worse until the extraction team locates him ten miles away from the hit site and injects him with their usual cocktail of drugs, pulling him under. His mission report doesn’t contain a single word to suggest there might have been another man, somebody who once trusted him.

It is utterly useless to the Soldier, this piece of information that somebody who most probably doesn’t even exist trusts him.

Still, he quietly bears the high voltage shocks they administer as punishment for missing his shot that first time, content in the knowledge that he gets to keep his piece of knowledge for the for the sake of knowledge, never to be tainted by its parsing though the his handlers. It burrows deep into his chest, lodging deeply, and for a moment he almost remembers what it feels like to _want_.

 

                                                                                                    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Bucky walks through the empty, darkened flat slowly, trying to memorize every corner of what home feels like as he trails his fingers over the walls and everything he touches.

He’d left the lights off on purpose; in the gentle shine of the early summer moon, their crappy little flat could be almost beautiful.

It never did grow out of its ugly duckling stage, he notes. If anything, it grew into an uglier, even messier duck which still sprouted the random lonely specimen of fungi in the corner. Swans were way overrated anyway.

It just may be the last time he’d be seeing what the little matchbox apartment that had been his home for the past six years looked like at night. He’d even been to say goodbye to Becca and Ma after dropping off the girls from the Expo, and Steve still wasn't home yet.

For once in his life, instead of worrying about Steve, he’d decided to take the night off from fretting and trust in Steve’s ability to not miss the last night Bucky’s here before shipping out the next morning. Hence, he’s jaunting around the house like a lost ghost. Give him a lighted candle and he’d nail the part.

His uniform is pressed, Ma insisting she do it one last time for him with an absent pat to his cheek, trying and failing to smile in a way that didn’t betray her own sick fear of him going to war. He could make all the wisecracks about being the last eligible bachelor to Steve, but when it came down to brass tacks, it was the women left behind who bore more weight than the heaviest rucksacks, carrying them on shoulders way stronger than those of the broadest men.

He supposes if he’s going to be maudlin, he might as well do it in comfort.

He lies down on the couch, which had now began to creak stridently under his full weight since the last couple of years.

“Take care of her for me,” he addresses the spiders.”I like it here just as much as you do. And I know you guys like me the best because I leave behind crumbs and other tasty bits, but don’t bite Stevie, Ok ? I’ll break out the broom and actually _clean_ from under there.”

“ _Die,_ ” he sincerely requests the cockroaches. They maintain a diplomatic silence. Bucky supposes that it’s for the best. He’d be very worried and feel immensely pathetic if they’d felt sorry enough for him to start squeaking back.

He absently runs his palm along the edge of the table, until they encounter an obstacle. One of their books. He takes it with him and turns on the light, prepared to give up his slovenly ways for one night to go and return it to its shelf when he recognizes it and stops dead.

The first and last time he’d seen _this_ particular book had been nearly six years back. The side of his head suddenly feels tender.

And because history repeats itself and Bucky is the President of Dreadful-decisionville, he helplessly find himself opening it again.

He passes the old sketches, the ones he’d seen before. He passes newer ones. Steve had taken to dating his work, so it’s easy to keep track of when he’d done what. For nearly a year after the last sketch he’d seen all those years ago, that of the girl on the chair, Steve had done nothing new. He’d slowly gone back to it though, technique more refined and work so lifelike, that Bucky imagines that if he’d put his ear to the page, he’d hear her heartbeat.

More and more work over the last three years, and there’s been one sketch for practically everyday during the months Bucky’s been away at basic. The binding on the spine is partially wrecked with the number of loose sheaves of paper Steve had jammed in there in an attempt to increase the number of pages in the book.

 _She’s_ changed too. While the initial sketches of her showed her figure as somewhat boyish, she’d undoubtedly been a woman.

One couldn’t be so sure now though. Her figure had changed from distinctly feminine, to androgynous, to unmistakably male in the later sketches. Bucky supposes he can’t call her a ‘her’ anymore. He wished he had a name to put to the figure, because even after all this time, there’s still no face.

And while the figure may have gone from a _she_ to a _he_ , it’s still the same person, he can be sure of that much. The poses had got decidedly more suggestive as the years had gone by, and because Bucky knew now that this was not based on any real person, he merely swallowed down that familiar old sense of intrusion and a breach of trust, and kept going without the sick sense of voyeurism to stop him this time.

He’s taken up with a series of smaller sketches along the lower right corner of the book. It’s a new addition, not something that was there the last time he’d peeked, since they’d started about halfway through the book. A flip animation sequence! Steve loved those things. Bucky hadn’t yet reached the end of the main sketches, but decided to check out the animation immediately and so backtracked to the first image and then thumbed it into life.

He watched as a figure whose only visible portion initially was the tops of their bare shoulders with their face hidden by their pillowed arms, raised said face off their arms just enough to wink. He flicked through it five more times. He didn’t have a lot to go on; just a headful of dark hair, the shape of the forehead and the eyebrows and eyes, but he’d know his own wink after all this time, because yessiree, there was a little animated him winking up from the corner. He’s absolutely thrilled at Steve’s choice of paneling for him. Bucky doubts that he’d ever get used to the way it made him feel when Steve drew him, the blatant care for him captured in each line.

Grinning in contentment, he gets to the last double page. Steve had gone the whole hog on it- it bore the only pair of colored images in the whole book. Not believing his eyes, he traced the lines of the first drawing, along her coltish limbs and broader-than-average shoulders and short hair. It was the girl from that first time, but his time, Steve had finally drawn in her face.

And it’s like that dream from so long ago, the one he couldn’t bear to forget but hadn’t had the courage to recall either, had come to life. She’s frozen on paper, half- closing _his_ eyes, raising _his_ eyebrow teasingly, half-smile on her face with _his_ lips twisting up and to the side, the cleft in _his_ chin deepening in hers while she smiled into her kiss.

Bucky looks at the drawing’s twin on the next page then, eyes landing on the line of text written out in Steve’s handwriting at the top.

_I’d much rather have the original._

Theres a scrap of what looks like poetry as well, but Bucky can't make out what's written. Under it, there’s a painting of him rendered in flawless detail, resting the same way the girl with his face was posing on the adjoining page. It’s so life-like, it could’ve been a photograph.

Except he’d never posed for Steve while kissing him gently, still fingertips pressed lightly to Steve’s jaw, his other hand twisted up in the front of Steve’s shirt.

Bucky compares the two paintings, Steve kissing her, and Steve kissing him. They’re both detailed enough that it doesn’t take much imagination to see either happening.

He shuts the book slowly, sinking down onto the sofa because his legs won’t take his weight no more, but he can’t help the sad smile that crosses his lips.

Bucky wonders, rueful with all the regrets more befitting of an old man, at what could have been, had he only the courage to match his imagination.

 

 


End file.
